Fall is here and the winter holiday season is right around the corner which may mean healthy living will start to take a backseat for many consumers as focus is turned to holiday cooking, entertaining and celebrating. But, just like consumers shouldn’t forget about healthy living until New Years … neither should the companies that market to them. Influencer marketing is a great way to connect with your target consumers all year long, even during your off season. In fact, the off-season may be a good time to brand out and try new types of influencers, different kinds of content and make sure you’re not getting lost in the frenzy of New Year health posts that are sure to ensue in a couple of months.

To help nutrition and health brands get started with trying something new in their off-season, we’ve put together a quick guide on all the different kinds of influencers that should be considered. Luckily, there is so much more than just “health” influencers out there. In fact, there are so many possibilities for health and wellness brands when working with influencers, it can be hard to know where to start. Maybe you’re a health brand for children, specializing in healthy food choices that kids want to eat. Maybe you strive to reach the elite fitness gurus out there or you just want to reach the busy target that barely has time for working out. Whatever your brand may focus on, below are just a few of the different kinds of influencers to help you decide which is the right fit for you.

Fitness –

This may seem like an obvious one, but fitness influencers are some of the best to use when promoting your health brand, especially if you find the perfect one that really believes in you and could potentially turn into a brand ambassador all year round. Most of these influencers are professionals in this field so their audience trusts their opinion when it comes to nutrition and exercise. Below, are some of our favorite fitness influencers.

Elainne is a fitness blogger based out of New York City with a reach of over 133k followers. Although she often posts about lifestyle and travel, her main focus is exercise and staying in shape. She even co-founded her own fitness channel called FitWithBAE.

Sarah is a full time health and fitness blogger based in Boston. A certified trainer, she focuses on motivating her audience and teaching them how to live a healthier lifestyle. She is also a mother and has dedicated posts on how to stay fit even during pregnancy. Her fitness videos are also extremely popular on YouTube where they have garnered over 230 million views.

Moms –

Mommy bloggers have some of the most loyal followings out there. And it’s easy to see why; they showcase brands they use for themselves and for their own children and therefore audiences trust them. There are tons of mom bloggers out there that focus specifically on how to raise their children with a healthier lifestyle which includes more nutritious foods and healthier products to keep around the house.

Sarah is a mom and lifestyle blogger based in the city of Denver. You can find anything on her page from style to travel, but one of her main focuses are her children. She posts often about the products she feels most confident using for them as well has healthy eating tips for her two young girls.

With over half a million followers on Instagram, Ellen has become one of the biggest mom bloggers on the platform. Based in beautiful Hawaii, her and her family of 5 show followers how to live a more holistic lifestyle. From living more naturally to a being a completely vegan family, you’ll feel healthier just looking at her page!

College –

A lot of health blogs these days come from college/millennial influencers. College influencers have proven to have a big voice on social media. Many millennials in college or going into college turn to these influencers for advice, and that includes the very real struggle to stay healthy in when moving away from home. They know college and young adulthood is a hard but important time to keep up with health. They show their followers how they do it.

Kruti is a Florida based recipe developer working on getting her masters in Occupational Therapy. She posts easy and healthy meals almost everyday on her channel. But Kruti is more than just a food blogger, she also talks about yoga, travel, and skin care and gets real about mental health and the importance of self care.

Winnie is an LA based food blogger, dietetic intern and future RD. She dedicates her page to showing her audience how to live a balanced lifestyle and proves that you can have all types of foods in a healthy diet. Along with her recipes, on her blog, you can also find fitness and nutrition tips.

Foodies –

Honestly, sometimes it can be more of a challenge to find recipe developers nowadays that don’t focus on healthy and clean eating than ones that do. There are tons of food bloggers out there that talk on all sorts of healthy eating whether it’s big meals for the family, quick and simple eats throughout the day, or how to eat Whole30 or vegan. These influencers dedicate their lives on how to be healthier and are trusted influencers to leverage when wanting to reach your audience with your health brand.

Peyton is a food blogger who has gained a huge audience from her delicious and healthy (and beautiful) recipes! Her main focus is nutritious eating, but she also throws in lifestyle posts, including her love for running and how she balances her life while staying healthy.

Everything to do with nutrition and wellness, you can find on this page. Wendy and & Jess are not only best friends, but recipe developers, registered dietitians, and certified diabetes educators. Their blog covers everything you’d want to know about living a healthier life. They also have a podcast where they dive deep into health and wellness where they discuss everything from eating habits to stress to yoga.

Lifestyle –

One great thing about lifestyle influencers is the diversity of their followers. Since most lifestyle influencers focus on so many different aspects of life, they tend to have a huge audience that ranges in interests, location, age, and gender. Although it isn’t their main focus, many big lifestyle influencers do discuss health and fitness, even if it’s just sporadically. But they have a loyal audience that is listening and hearing their suggestions.

Kristin is a huge macro influencer both on Instagram and on YouTube. She focuses on everything from beauty, fashion, home decor, cooking, marriage, being a dog mom, and everything in between. She’s even started her own company, KristinMadeInc! She’s also extremely open and honest with her audience about things like anxiety and her faith which has gained her a loyal and dedicated following. Kristin also gets real about health and talks in her videos about healthy skincare, her fitness routine, and what she eats in a day.

This law school grad turned influencer has gained over 222k followers and it’s not hard to see why. Her feed has fashion, travel, beauty, food. She also runs her own blog where you can find posts about staying in shape, her favorite workout gear, healthy eating habits, as well as managing healthy hair and skin.

Conclusion –

There are millions of profiles out there and thousands of them are discussing health in one way or another. It can be hard to know which type of influencer is right for YOUR specific health brand. Remember, being a health brand, you have the benefit of having a large target market. Even if they don’t seem like the obvious choice, you never really know who your target is following until you do more research. Healthy eating, fitness, being a mom, skincare, even mental health, there are influencers that specialize in it all and want to recommend your product to their followers. So get out there on your off-season, try something new and reap the rewards of keeping your brand front and center to consumers all year long.

About MATTR

MATTR is the only full-service influencer marketing provider with detailed audience insights from PersonaMesh™. We go beyond demographics into psychographics such as values and interests so that your influencer campaigns align with your campaign targets.

As Influencer Marketing enters its second decade in the modern world of marketing, the confusing fragmentation of providers is lifting. This means more clarity for you when it’s time to either dip your toes in the water or, if you’ve been doing it a while, fully insource the capability. But navigating the waters is still challenging: exactly what does Company X offer? Will they do the whole thing, or only parts of a campaign? Does it require a subscription to use Company Y’s platform?

Who does what?

There is no shortage of influencer marketing companies out there. Whether they describe themselves as tech companies, agencies, platforms, marketplaces, or solutions, they are all working to help connect brands and influencers in one way or another. Some are simply tech platforms that allow you to go into their pool of influencers and search yourself, while some search for you but once they find the influencer you’re on your own. Then there are the white glove services which are providers that do the searching, engaging, and activating for you. These different types of providers have their pros and cons. Choosing the right one will depend on what type of campaign you are looking for, your company’s experience with influencer campaigns, and how much bandwidth and budget you have. Here are a few things to consider when deciding which type of influencer provider is right for you.

DIY

A do-it-yourself type solution can mean a couple different things. It may simply be a tech platform where you gain access and search through their influencers, or perhaps the company finds influencers for you, but you carry out the campaign on your own. Many companies see a lot of pros in running these campaigns themselves. One of the biggest is the fact that the control is still in their hands. When brands are new to influencer marketing a lot of times they fear not having complete control over the outcome of the campaign and allowing a third party to take care of it. Hanging on to that control means no middleman between you and the influencer, which could mean less room for misunderstandings. Another benefit to this DIY approach is cost. When you do not have to pay a vendor for what you can do yourself, it will of course be a lot cheaper.

Not having that third party can mean a lot of cons as well. There is always a lot of friction and uncertainty in influencer campaigns because you’re often depending on people who have a full time job such as an accountant, personal trainer, stay-at-home mom or whatever. Especially if you are new to the game, you may come to crossroads and have to make decisions that could cost you engagement in the long run. One of the biggest downfalls to running a campaign yourself is the time and stress it can cause you. Searching, engaging, and activating influencers can be a long process, and a stressful one at that. On the surface level, influencer marketing seems very simple. There are millions and millions of social profiles out there, so of course it’s easy to find the right person for you, right? Just do a Google search for Denver based mom influencers or New Jersey based food influencers. But don’t forget that on top of that you need to make sure their audience is a certain age, and they have the right location, and they create good content, plus their psychographics need to align, their engagement has to be high, and their credibility with likes and impressions needs to be authentic. Even after all of that, are they going to be interested in working on your campaign? Are they complicated to work with? Too expensive? Do they have the availability? There is so much more that goes into these searches that isn’t realized. Searches like that cannot simply be automated or all found in one platform. Lastly, most DIY platforms require an annual subscription. And if that platform’s list of influencers is static, you’re going to see the same influencers appear each time you search for “moms, finance, New York.”

These providers do work well for certain brands and certain campaigns. Those who may be more experienced in influencer marketing may have the experience and time that doesn’t require a third party. On the other hand, maybe you are so new to influencer marketing that you want to run a small test campaign. If you are running a small and/or short campaign with micro influencers, it can be a low cost way to step into the world of influencer marketing.

White Glove Service

White Glove, or Full Service providers, are those that choose the influencers, engage, activate, and carry out the campaign for you. If the provider is heavy on the tech behind the selection of influencers and offers you a log-in at real time stats during the campaign, we’d call them a “Full Service Platform”. There are many pros to going with a full service solution. Perhaps the biggest one is having the stress of influencer campaigns lifted off of you. There is a lot more that goes into a campaign beyond choosing the right influencer. After the influencers are chosen, contracts have to be written up based on the guidelines of the brand, the FTC, and any partnership guidelines the influencer may have. And no matter what, keep in mind, that there is still the possibility of mistakes in the campaign. Perhaps the influencer created a post without #ad. Or content was sent a day late. These mishaps can happen often, even with the most experienced influencers. Most brands may not have time to troubleshoot and worry about these tiny, or sometimes big, bumps in the road or worse may not even notice them until they become large problems. We talked last week, when discussing Facebook’s new influencer platform, that the human-ness of influencer marketing means the possibility for mistakes. Working with humans has its pros, such as authenticity and engagement, but humans are only, well, human, and working with them also means anticipating the possibilities for errors along the way. It is extremely rare to go through an influencer campaign without one single mishap. When you engage a truly skilled influencer service, you shouldn’t even know when anything goes wrong because your service provider has the time and experience to quickly fix any issues that may pop up in a campaign.

The most obvious con to having white glove service is the cost. To have all of this work done by a third party it is going to be more expensive. It’s up to you to decide if the extra engagement and time saved are worth the cost. One of the most common reasons brands are hesitant to go with agencies is their fear of giving up control. Many brands see the product or service as their baby and they are protective of the way it is marketed, which is understandable. They want to have say over the entire look and feel over the campaign, when, how, and what is shown. However, a good full service company will still allow you to have say. Find a platform that works with you and allows you to give approvals on dates, influencers, content, etc. Try and think of this approach as more of a collaboration between you and the company.

White Glove Service is for many brands and companies. It can be extremely beneficial to companies that are new to influencer marketing and have little prior experience. It can also be for bigger and more experienced companies too – ones that might have a huge campaign that they do not have time to run completely alone. This is especially important if that campaign is going to include lots of influencers, niche targets, or long running partnerships anything that may be out of norm.

Insourcing

Another option is bringing influencer marketing in house which many enterprises are moving towards. This can be a long process and it’s important to understand every aspect before deciding if this is right for you or not. Insourcing is for brands and companies truly committed to influencer marketing and thinking about it long term (next 3-5 years). There are many things to consider such as: You may need to create an entire department with many employees. You may need to work with other departments like the brand teams, marketing, and IT to make the new team efficient and effective. But, the upside is that the cost savings can be immense for a large enterprise with multiple brands – into the millions of dollars per year. You can check out our White Paper on Insourcing which gives you details about this process here.

Conclusion

There are lots of options in influencer marketing when it comes to choosing which partner is right for you. Take into consideration what your campaign needs, where you’re at with influencer marketing, and what your budget is. Each option has its benefits and setbacks; think about what you can afford to do on your own or if it’s worth outsourcing to obtain your goal. Once you know influencer marketing is something you want a long term relationship with, then you can think about insourcing and becoming an internal agency yourself.

About MATTR

MATTR is the only full-service influencer marketing provider with detailed audience insights from PersonaMesh™. We go beyond demographics into psychographics such as values and interests so that your influencer campaigns align with your campaign targets.